


Omissions

by zamwessell



Category: Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (2013)
Genre: First Time, Friends With Benefits, I Am No F Scott Fitzgerald, M/M, POV First Person, narrators with benefits, possibly requited
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-15
Updated: 2013-05-15
Packaged: 2017-12-11 22:42:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,363
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/804062
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zamwessell/pseuds/zamwessell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was a lie that he had not used the pool all summer, just as it was a lie that I had been drunk precisely twice. We had used it. I have been drunk more times than that.</p><p>There is another lie that I am more reluctant to reveal and that ensures this will never see publication.</p><p>(Nick's addendum to the events of The Great Gatsby)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Omissions

**Author's Note:**

> i've read the book a few times, but not as recently as i've seen the movie, so my Nick voice is probably a little off. sorry, f. scott!

It was a lie that he had not used the pool all summer, just as it was a lie that I had been drunk precisely twice. We had used it. I have been drunk more times than that. 

There is another lie that I am more reluctant to reveal and that ensures this will never see publication.

  
I am not sure how to begin to tell it. 

 

\--

I always called him Jay. Even after he explained. I would not, I think, have gotten on my knees for Jimmy Gatz from nowhere. But for Jay Gatsby – there were few limits to what I would do. I wish I could say honestly that getting on my knees had been the extent of it. But by the time it was over I had known Jay Gatsby in every way it is possible for a man to know another man. Except the one way I wanted – to see his eyes light up for me, his smile bloom for me in particular. I could not have this knowledge and instead I made do with what he was willing enough to give me. One night I dared to ask why he permitted me to take these liberties with him.

"It was you who offered, old sport," he said. He turned over, half-rolled up in the sheet. (He had made a great show of telling me what material the sheets were made of, and how far away he ordered them, and I had nodded, my fingers working him out of the shirt that had come all the way from England to settle in a heap next to my Minnesota undershorts. "I'm not impressed. You ought to tell me that this sort of cotton was originally used to wrap a mummy, and you stole it from a pharaoh's tomb." "I was telling you the truth," he said, sounding almost wounded. )

"Oh." I reached for his cigarette and he let me take a drag on it. The gesture, when he performed it, seemed suddenly drained of all intimacy. I had shared cigarettes before, mainly afterwards, sometimes before, and it always seemed a shared secret, casually flaunted, a reminder that we had not been shy with one another or did not intend to be.

Gatsby was always shy about it. I think he enjoyed himself – no, I am certain of it, I am so confident in my own prowess as that, at least – but he was not vocal. I think he feared to abandon himself too much, that Jay Gatsby was a bright balloon he had caught and had always to keep hold of by two fingers, even in moments when an ordinary man would have been lost to all sense. I think he feared that if he let the balloon go he would not get it back. It would drift up out of sight and pop in the ether and leave him holding not even so much as the string. He was always holding something in reserve. Even in moments when I thought he had let go for a second, something would surge out of him and catch the thread.

 

I told him everything. He smiled.

 

What had compelled me to leave the Middle West was the combination of my literary unsuccess and the fact that my father had caught me taking rather longer to repair a car than the car demanded, because the mechanic demanded far more attention than the car. He had vowed not to tell my mother, on the condition that I headed East and did not repeat the behavior. Boys grew out of it, he led me to understand.

I intended to grow out of it, just as I intended to become a bond salesman. I bought all the relevant literature. Then Gatsby showed up and I forgot what I had bought it for.

Jordan Baker had seemed like the ticket, at first. She was more like what I liked than the girl I wrote to back home. I told Gatsby this and he smiled. It was not a particular smile, it was his general smile.

I always felt somehow as if he were doing me a favor and not the other way around. He paid me in glances and touches the way he would have offered me money; calmly, with a certain precision. I think by now you know the name for what this was, but I pretended that I did not. He permitted me to lie with my head in the crook of his arm, and I could feel him staring past me at the green light.

"Damn that stupid light," I wanted to say. "I'm here, forget all that." But I knew that those words, as soon as uttered, would pluck him away from me. I could only remain so close by feigning indifference to whether I were close, just as, the afternoon before the first time, I had pretended our hands brushed by accident in the car.

In retrospect I wonder if he thought he owed it to me for bringing him Daisy.

He was familiar enough with the physical act. At first I thought it was the war, the shy fumbling feverish intimacies that sprang up among the troops. But the war came after Daisy. As I write these words now I wonder if it were not the millionaire on his yacht, if that might perhaps have been the cause of his aloofness even in the throes of what I in my naïve way accounted passion.

 

\--

The last night was different.

"Stay up with me?" he asked.

I halted. It was the first time he had asked since the beginning of things with Daisy. I ought to have repulsed him. If I had had any pride at the beginning of the equation, I would have done so.

As it was I practically dragged him up the stairs. I had hungered for him in the filthiest way I knew how.  We did not make it to the bedroom. We got as far as the organ bench. Midway through my knee jostled loose one of the stops and he smothered a laugh in my shoulder as the note rang out through the empty house. I jostled another one. He reached over and tugged out a handful. The harsh flood of music tore laughs from both our throats. I even dared to kiss him, then. He finished, kissing me on the back of the neck with the same gesture Tom Buchanan would have used to deposit a fiver on a prostitute's night table.

"You were never one for doing things by halves," I said. I touched the spot on the back of my neck. He studied my face, idly, the way your eyes fix on a spot on the wall without paying attention to it.

He seemed very tired. I pushed the stops back in.

"I'm sorry, old sport," he said.

"Sorry?"

I could feel the bob of his adam's apple against my shoulder. "You are very generous," he said.

I swallowed. "I am happy to."

"Are you?"

I reached for one of his hands and he let me take it. I studied the blunt neat fingers. "I'm sorry I dragged you into this," I said.

"My dear fellow," Gatsby said, sounding puzzled, "you need not apologize."

"Thank you," I said.

"I want you to be happy, Nick," he said, and slid an arm around me, his face in my shoulder. "I want everyone good in the world to be happy. Are you happy?"

"I am happy to be with you, Gatsby," I said.

"I like the way you say it," Gatsby said. "The name, I mean. It does me good."

"I wish I could make you happy."

That was one thing we would not be doing. "Gatsby," I said again. "What would you say if I told you I was—"

"Please, Nick," Gatsby said, clambering off the organ bench, "please don't ask me that."

"Do I repulse you so much?" I said, with a laugh that choked itself.

"Nick," Gatsby said. "I don't want another row."

I laughed again. "I never make rows," I said.

"Nick."

"I don't like the way you say it."

"Nick."

"Gatsby," I said.

He looked sorrowfully at me. "Do you believe me?" he said. As soon as it had flared my anger died. He saw as much on my face. Then he told me everything. James Gatz, from nowhere. I looked at him and waited for his face to change and his body to change and to feel myself repulsed but they did not and I was not. When he was done talking I kissed him. He told me about Dan Cody and his yacht and loving Daisy the first time and I tried to kiss the story off his lips the way a mother washes her child's mouth with soap.

"You still hope?" I said. 

"Always." He caught me looking at him. My face must have showed something. "I'm sorry," he said again. "It should have been y- different."

"You've lied so much," I wanted to say, "to so many people, lies that could kill them. Could you not spare one more lie for me, when I need it to live on?" But instead I said, "No, Gatsby, it's a beautiful story."

He looked at me and I think he read the thought, or something like it. "You don't really want me to lie?"

"What would you say if you were lying?" I said. By this time I had followed him up the stairs to the bed.

"I would say, Nick Carraway, you are a remarkable specimen of manhood," Jay said. "That in itself is not a lie. I would say – I find the way you kiss intoxicating. That is not a lie either. A man could get drunk that way. A man could get himself into grave danger that way. You should be very careful whom you kiss with a mouth like that, Nick Carraway."

I kissed him. This time I felt him in the kiss. I opened my eyes and looked at him and he looked back at me and smiled against my lips, and then my eyes fell shut again.

"I like it when you watch me," Gatsby said. He traced the line of my cheek with one finger and I could not look at him.

"I am not saying any of these things, old sport, you understand?"

"I understand," I said.

"What men do together is a crude thing, a four letter word, I could not make love to you if I tried."

"I think you could," I said.

"You think I hung the moon."

"You flew the moon in all the way from Egypt."

He shot me a look that was almost pained, but with amusement recognizable somewhere in its depths. I pushed him down on the bed and kissed the side of his face, his neck; my lips brushed clumsily along the ridge of his ear.

"Do you think of me when I'm not with you?" I asked.

He looked at me. I could tell from his eyes that I must have looked startling, that I had not disguised my want, and that it flattered him and unnerved him in equal measures.

"How do I put this, old sport?" He leaned up and kissed me on the neck where I most liked to be kissed. He had noticed that at least. "James Gatz might have, at one time. But that's all done with, Nick."

"Oh," I said, because it was all I could say. I knew boys like James Gatz wanted me. I hadn't wanted them. Every time, I was giving myself to someone who did not exist except as an idea in Gatsby's mind. I didn't love James Gatz. I tried to think of him as James Gatz, lying there, but I couldn't. I had been a fool for trying to talk. "Let me, Jay." I began insinuating myself between his legs.

"You've always understood me," Gatsby said.

 

\--

 

That time even though I was trying to be there and only there, with the familiar peculiar salt of Gatsby filling my mouth, I could not help straying back to a night in Minnesota watching the mechanic rear the car up slowly on a winch, bit by bit, like Atlas straining beneath the globe on my father's desk.

"Here," I said, finally.

"You don't mind?"

"Mind why would I mind. Here." I began to turn it and he stood back with his arms folded and lit himself a cigarette. It was harder than it looked.

"Harder than it looks, eh?" he said.

"No," I said. I took off my shirt and wiped my brow with it and looked at him and he made a point of not looking at me and the car reared up next to me by degrees.

He let me share the cigarette.

Finishing another cigarette behind the shop ("I think you're liable to engine trouble. Ought to bring her by next week." "It's not—Oh.") and letting our fingers brush and looking at each other and then looking away, grinning with the jack-o-lantern glow of knowledge we had acquired in the shed behind the shop, he told me about airplanes. He was building one, he said. Did I want to see it?

I told him I hoped it was a euphemism and he gave me a disappointed look and I said sure.

He had all the parts around the propeller, except the propeller was a little fidgety, but the real trouble was the wings weren't working.

Then my father caught us a few weeks later contemplating my engine trouble and I went East. Every so often I look up for airplanes with fidgety propellers to see what kind of wings he wound up with.

 

\--

I could feel Gatsby's fingers in my hair.

His voice was a pair of ragged scissors cutting my name out of the night. He watched me swallow with something almost approaching interest.

"I'm so sorry, Nick, I should have warned you," he said, stroking his thumb from my ear down my cheek. It was a funny way he had.

"Don't be," I murmured. I tried to kiss his thumb but he did not seem to understand the gesture. "I enjoy it."

 

\--

The first time had been entirely my fault. I say that now. These haphazard connections are seldom entirely one person's fault.

"Come use the pool, old sport," he said.

"All right," I said.

That was when I sensed I would need to start lying.

 

\--

"You've waited five years," I said. I lay on the raft. He was floating on his back in the water next to me staring upwards.

"Has it been five?"

"You said."

He swam to the wall and executed a neat flip-turn, returned to me. He was grinning like a boy with a jar of fireflies. I was half in love with him already.

"Jay," I said. "Five years? I don't believe it." I splashed him. "The Jay Gatsby? A monk? An anchorite? A hermit?"

He laughed that slightly nervous laugh of a schoolboy posed a word he can't quite spell. "You're just as bad as Jordan."

I splashed him again. "Surely you afforded yourself some relief?"

Then he was actually blushing. He sank below the water and surfaced abruptly at the edge of the raft, capsizing me. "There, old sport! You've been relieved," he said.

I surfaced, coughing up water, tried to tackle him. He was a better swimmer than I and the water was just deep enough to confer an advantage. I panted over to the wall. "I don't think you're really such a hermit as all that."

He swam over to the wall and joined me. "No?"

"I was in the war too, you know."

"I know."

"Nothing seems so interesting afterwards."

"That wasn't even two years."

"It was still long to wait," I said. I let myself sink beneath the water and surfaced too close to him.

"Nick," he said, "that's—you should move your hand—"

"I beg your pardon," I murmured, giving him a very pointed look, "I didn't realize I was touching it." I let the hand brush casually against the front of his swim trunks and I watched realization dawn on his features. When he opened his mouth to say something the words were very slow in coming out. I leaned in and kissed him instead. He let me kiss him with something like shock.

"You're not used to being kissed," I said. I have never in my life been brash like this. But with Gatsby so close to me in that moment I felt capable of anything. If his mind was slow to respond I was having better success with the contents of his swim trunks.

"I've kissed people," Gatsby said. "All sorts of people."

"Oh yes," I said, and my fingers found his arm and curled up it to his shoulder, "all sorts of the most interesting and preeminent people."

He looked flattered and my heart ached for him. "You said it yourself," he said, "old sport," and then I had to kiss him again, to stop him talking. You could not help feeling ashamed for him. At least that was what I thought then. As soon as I had noticed myself wanting him I began to wince at everything he did.

"There's a man who sleeps inside your organ," I said, when I pulled back, and started laughing.

"Klipspringer's a descendant of Beethoven," Gatsby said. Again I felt a pang. I was opening my mouth to say something when he leaned in and kissed me. There was more force in it this time. He was a quick study. When he pulled away I was breathless and he actually smirked.

"What do you say to that, old sport?"

"Again," I said. He obliged. His fingers caught in my wet hair and I grunted against his lips. I tried to pull him out of his bathing costume. It came off one of his shoulders. I tugged at the other.

"Nick?" he said, pulling back.

"Let's get you out of this suit," I said. I tugged the rest of it down and it tangled around his knees.

"Nick, people will see me."

I glanced down. "You've got nothing to be ashamed of," I said.

"I didn't know you liked—"

"I don't," I said, too quickly. "You're an exception. Get up on the side."

He was kind enough not to press the point. "Still I shouldn't like anyone to see me li—"

I ran my tongue over my lips almost without meaning to. "They won't be able to, Gatsby," I said. "My head will be in the way."

His eyes met mine. He lifted himself up onto the side of the pool and I tugged his legs apart and stood between them. I don't know if anyone saw us like that. At Gatsby's house you could never be sure. Still I don't regret doing it for him, in the open like that, the air blowing cool on the water on my neck. I had not realized how long I had been wanting it until I put my mouth on him. The wanting shot through me like electric current. I braced myself on his thighs, feeling the gooseflesh prickle beneath my fingers. It had been too long since Minnesota.

"God," he said. "Nick. God. You shouldn't, old sport, you—Nick – don't stop please don't stop--" I had made his voice change. I noted the fact impartially.

After that we used the pool as a matter of course. The pool, several of the sofas, his bed, and once, my bed, the day before he was due to have tea with Daisy, that time with something almost like regret in his bright eyes.

 

\--

 

Some of the things I let him do I had never done with anyone. He would never have asked. I suggested all of them. I was very drunk the first time I suggested – I do not like to put the word down on paper, but you can guess what it was. I had the half-baked idea that it would mean more to him than the other things. I was, as I have said, a fool.

\--

"Can I ask you another thing?" he asked, that last night in the depths of his bed as we lay passing a cigarette back and forth.

"What, Jay?"

"Did you suspect, before?"

"I—" I didn't know what to say.  Of course I suspected. But he looked so hopeful. "Isn't it funny," I said instead, "we both came all the way from the Middle West to New York City, and here I am doing exactly what my father—" I realized the implication of what I was saying and snapped the sentence off. He looked warily at me.

"I know what you mean," he said. "Doing the unspeakable with another farmboy."

"I didn't mean that, Gatsby," I said. I caught him by the wrists and shoved him back on the bed. He looked up at me. "She'll come around," I said, and we both knew it was a lie.

He leaned up and kissed me for saying it. There was something different about him this time, as if he wanted to pull me as close to him as he possibly could, to huddle with me and weather the storm, and here I was knowing myself by far the weaker of the two of us, and no fit shelter at all.

"Let's get out of here," he said.

"Would you?" I said.

"Yes. No. I don't know."

"Let's get out of here," I said, pushing the sheet off of him, and there was nothing between us again. "It's rotten here. Let's leave this city and these phony people and –"

He grinned. "And what?"

"And anything, Jay. You have big ideas."

"The biggest." I tugged him up into my arms and he pressed me back down on the bed. "I flew them in from Egypt."

"I believe you," I said.

His fingers began to work in me again and a few moments later I was gasping his name, his wonderful imaginary name, into very expensive sheets.

"I believe you," I was saying. "Jay – God – there, like that – you've spoiled me for everyone else – Jay – I was so innocent once—"

"You never were, Nick," he said, halting the steady motion of his hips. "You seduced me."

"I couldn't have," I said, and he started again, and it was bliss again, it was the very thing that would have killed my father had he seen it, that I had not attempted with anyone before Gatsby with his wide hopeful eyes and steady gaze, and if I had managed to conceal the sheer want and desperation in my eyes before I could not now, I was shoving up greedily to meet his thrusts, there were fireworks inside my brain. I tried to say as much. "Jay—" I choked, "all that money to show me fireworks and – Jesus yes – all you had to do was—"

"Was," he said, looking a little embarrassed of the words even though his body was no longer shy of me, "w-was spread your legs and have at it, old sport?"

"Jesus yes," I heard, as though from far away. I was within and without, I thought, with a quirk of my mouth – no, he was within and without. I choked back a laugh. It was better not to think. "Harder." He obliged, looking a little nervous, and I gasped and shuddered beneath him. I do not know what I became in those moments. If you were to show me a picture I would not recognize myself. "More," I said. "Harder. Gatsby. Please."

"You could have, looking like that," he said, and his voice was rougher than I had heard it. We were both close. He leaned down and brought our mouths together. It was the first real kiss between us. Before I had kissed him or he had kissed me but this time we were kissing each other, we were both desperate for once, it was all teeth and tongue and stubble grazing my cheek. It was bruising and there was something dangerous about it that pushed me over the edge.

 

"Look what I've done to the sheet," I said, afterwards, sitting on the edge of the bed pulling on my underwear.

"You're not going?"

"Am I not?"

"Please," Gatsby said. "You don't want to miss breakfast."

"I hope that's a euphemism," I said. I crawled back into bed and let him settle in my arms for once. He seemed to need the reassurance.

After I thought he was asleep I kissed his forehead. "There are wonderful things in store for you, Jay Gatsby," I whispered, letting my lips brush the line on his brow where the sweat-damp hair still clung.

He chuckled sleepily in my arms. "Wonderful things," he murmured.

I started. I had not expected an answer. "Good night, old sport."

"Don't you start saying it too."

For a long time after he fell asleep I lay there staring at the green light. That was the only night we had as anything resembling lovers. Before that I had given myself to him and taken nothing in return. But that one night he lay asleep in my arms and I thought – perhaps this is after all why I came East. I watched him sleep until I fell asleep myself.

 

\--

After breakfast I went back into the maw of the city. I do not know what would have happened had I stayed. Perhaps Mr. Wilson would have killed me too. Perhaps I would have been glad.

Perhaps he would be glad that I am here. I write now the things that did and did not happen. His name was Jay Gatsby and there were many, many nights I loved him and one sparkling night that he loved me. I cling to this. I am going west soon, not half-way west, back home, but all the way west, to the coast. I had half a mind to keep a weather eye for airplanes with surprising wings. But I am not ready to look up yet.


End file.
